About Me

I'm a peace-loving married Indian male on the right side of '50 with
college-going children, and presently employed under government.
Educationally I've a master's degree in History, and another in Computer
Application. Besides, I've a post graduate diploma in Management. My
published works are:- (1)"In Harness", ISBN 81-8157-183-5, a poetry
collections and (2) "The Remix of Orchid", ISBN 978-81-7525-729-0, a
short story collections with a foreword by Mr. Ruskin Bond, (3)
"Virasat", ISBN 978-81-7525-982-9, again a short story collection but in
Hindi, (4) "Ek Saal Baad," ISBN 978-81-906496-8-1, my second Story
Collection in Hindi.

Saturday, September 20, 2014

The Salvation-III

The Salvation-III

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Now Milkha, the patriot-apparition finally gets something interesting to do. He is no longer worried about the overwhelming changes in everything he comes accross in the city. He is not in a hurry to go back to his cave to resume his life as a ghost. He'll help people in distress in his preternatural way. Read on, here's the last installment of the story.

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As the shadow of despondency swept the troupe, Milkha took it upon
himself to prevent the impending fiasco. In a way, the disappearance of Mihir
threw a golden opportunity before Milkha to realise the dream of his life. Yes!
The spectral being had a dream—and a nagging dream at that! With no loss of
time he transformed himself into Mihir’s appearance. Milkha had had no occasion
to see Mihir anytime in the past. Nevertheless, for a ghost with exalted sense
of patriotism, it was not very hard a job to morph into any form—seen or
unseen.

Everybody in the troupe
was happy to see Mihir back. None could get a scent of the trick Milkha was
then up to, as he was eminently suited to his new role. The director was both
angry and happy at the same time.

‘How can you...you...my donkey...how can you make it? Time is
running out...my god, how can you make it?’ the director fumbled for words
effective enough to reprimand and at the same time encourage the neglectful
artist.

‘I promise my
mentor...I promise...I promise my guide...I’ll not leave any scope for your
embarrassment,’ the spectral imposter tried to assure the director. His
implicit parody was more than evident that made the director chuckle.

‘Let the show
get over, I’ll kill you to death,’ the director hinted Mihir that he was going
to sodomise him for all the tension he had perpetrated on him.

The play would be staged in
five short hours. The actors should proceed to the green room at least two
hours in advance. So, where was the time for Milkha alias Mihir to go through
the rehearsal? Now a full course of it was out of question since the rest of
the actors who had already done their bits were just not willing to repeat them
for the fear of muddling things up. Anyhow, the director took the help of the
spot-boys and went ahead. To his amazement, he found Mihir superbly fluent and
bereft of any jitters. As if he was imitating certain live character. There was
no slip of his tongue, and his dialogue delivery was only too perfect. The
fellow did not even wait to catch the prompting near him to recall his words!
All the fear of the director was allayed. He was cheering the actor at regular
intervals, pause-by-pause, and delivery-by-delivery. He had no doubt that the
show was going to register a success—a thundering success.

The play began at the
appointed time, 7:30 p.m. sharp, amidst capacity crowd. The show was organised
in the Netaji Stadium to be enacted on an open-air stage. With minimum of
introductory music, the play started.

The playwright, it
appeared, had hastily cobbled together scenes and sequences that did not
necessarily keep in mind the temperament of the modern audience. It had no
frill of necessary humour; it was a tragedy, a tearjerker in that sense.
Nevertheless, the storyline had its moments of histrionics—alien’s barbaric
treatment for the violence, the accumulation of anger for building of the plot,
the conspiracy and the killing of the villain for the climax, and finally the
backlash and the parting tragedy.

Just a few scenes
hurried through the introduction of the characters and the play briskly
gathered the pace. As the plot thickened, it plodded its way to a flat top to
show the nitty-gritty of the barbaric treatment of the deportees. More and more
it became evident that the playwright had lost his grip. Now it was a challenge
before the artists to turn a crudely written drama into a well-enacted play.
There were standard performances from everybody. But the two artists who
outperformed the others were in the roles of Viceroy, Lord Mayo and Sher Ali.
The effect of Viceroy Mayo could not be long lasting on the audience, as the
same was very brief. But Milkha played the role of Sher Ali with matchless
élan, moving in tandem with the spectators and claiming their approbations on
the way. There was ecstasy among the spectators when Sher Ali stabbed Lord
Mayo, the symbol of exploitation. Milkha in the role of Sher Ali was also
ecstatic. He overacted on the stage exceeding his brief. In a fit of
jubilation, he laughed and laughed creating a crescendo that reverberated
through the atmosphere right into the depth of the Bay of
Bengal. It appeared as though the original soundtrack of Gabbar
Singh’s laugh in the movie “Sholay” was being played at the background boosting
its pitch and volume by a thousand times. The sense of xenophobic derision
behind the momentous laughter of Milkha on the stage touched the audience, and
they all joined him in their bid to express their solidarity with the patriot.
The whole of Port Blair resonated from corner to corner. Initially perturbed at
the wayward performance of the artist, the director of the play began to
realise the magic. He also started to chortle with delight.

Followed, thereafter,
the tragic end of Sher Ali. When the trial of the accused-murderer took place,
Milkha in the role of Sher Ali went on replying to all the questions the
prosecutor put to him, bluntly and derisively. There were lines in his reply
that even the playwright did not provide. There were cadences in his tone that even
the director did not teach. He held his head high in pride and satisfaction of
achieving something good, something great, and something that would have
required him to take birth again and again to accomplish. He was literally
wearing a halo, awe-inspiring and majestic.

Prosecutor:Who else was with you when

you killed his Excellency?

Sher Ali:Nobody, er, God, the great.

Prosecutor:Why did you kill?

Sher Ali:By the order of God.

Prosecutor:Did you do the crime?

Sher Ali:God knows.

Prosecutor:Do you know you’ll be hanged?

Sher Ali:Kill me?Do you know

I’m dead? And you want to kill a man

in shackles? A dead man?

Uttering those words of
contempt he again burst into laughter. The tempo and pitch of his laughter was
as high as it was at the time of the climax when Sher Ali killed Lord Mayo. But
this time the audience did not join. Rather, a few of them cried and a few
others held back their emotion in grim anticipation of the impending calamity.

The last scene of
execution of Sher Ali was quite touching. The enactment was flawless, and
everybody had only praise for the artists…and for their director.

*********

The splendid performance of the dramatic group had an unexpected
spin-off. It caught the attention of one Mr Premkant, the owner of a chain of star
hotels in India
and abroad, who was also known for his interests in movie making. Dealing with
historical themes and patriotic potboilers had been his forte. Whatever
historical movies he had produced so far had registered their success at the
box office. Now, deeply impressed by the performance of Sher Ali, he sent word
from his hotel that he would like to see the artist. He was sure the drama
could be profitably filmed and for that he was ready to invest up to a billion.
It would be a fantastic historical, a movie that would be better than the best
he had ever produced. He would not compromise on anything and, to start with,
he would have the entire shooting done at the Andamans.

Mr Premkant’s assistant
came down to the place where the troupe was lodged. He had the message of his
boss for Mihir that he sought to deliver personally. The director was restless,
pacing up and down outside his lodge.

‘Mihir? Oh yes, Mihir. But where the hell the man is now? We
don’t know where the fellow is disappearing. Only yesterday, he kept us under
head-bursting tension and finally turned up at the eleventh hour to take part
in the play. Today, as soon as the performance was over, he’s vanished, God
knows where,’ said the director in a very exasperated mood.

‘Well, here’s an
important message for your friend from Mr Premkant. He intends to make a movie
on last night’s play and wants to take your friend Mr Mihir in the lead role,’
said the messenger explaining the purpose of his visit.

As the visitor was about to
leave, he sighted somebody approaching the camp. He was barely lugging his
feet. At his first glance the director rushed towards his favourite disciple
addressing him by his name. The visitor came to know that the fellow was Mihir,
the person he was supposed to meet on behalf of Mr Premkant. It was beyond his
wildest dreams that his boss was going to make a hero out of this person, who
was nothing less than a lanky haggard of a famine-stricken village. He decided to
share his impression fully with Mr Premkant and save him from an impending
financial disaster.

Now the mystery that
unfolded by and by drove everybody into great befuddlement. Mihir emphatically
denied that he had taken part in the previous night’s play. He went to Mt
Harriet by trekking and while coming downhill on a different trail, he lost his
way. Howsoever he tried he could not come out of the wilderness. It was in his
destiny to suffer. Hunger and the stings of the centipede, the loss of blood to
leeches and a night full of harrowing uncertainties—everything came down too
hard on him. The leeches that rained from the trees or the snakes that crossed
his road were full of mercy for him—maybe they spared him to see his friends again.
When the day broke, he resumed his journey, and at noon, he discovered that he
was going in a wrong direction. Then and there he changed his course, an act
that finally brought him to Port Blair after a forty-six-hour terrifying
ordeal. Now, back in his brood, he was profusely apologetic in his tone as he
asked the pardon of one and all for his act of crass stupidity.

Initially, none present
there was prepared to buy his explanation. It was just too weird. But as Mihir
insisted and showed the sores on his feet or the marks of insect bite on his
body, all began to believe the version but reluctantly. The mystery still
remained before them: who acted Sher Ali onstage last night if he was not
Mihir?

It was a double drama,
a double mystery—Mihir in the role of Sher Ali, and some mysterious fellow in
the role of Mihir.

Milkha, the ghost
being, the pious and patriotic, had no further desire left in him after killing
the viceroy, His Excellency Lord Mayo. He had had the last laugh, sonorously
deriding the colonial cruelty, from the land of free India. He left the surreal realm of
ghosts and goblins and set out his journey into the heaven. There his friends
were waiting to accord him a hero’s welcome.

Friday, September 19, 2014

The Salvation-II

The Salvation-II

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Milkha, the fellow from the small principality under the British rule was falsely implicated in a case of sedition and was banished to the island of the Andamans where there were only sufferings for him to endure. He was tortured by the officials and Milkha tried to escape the agony come what may. In the process, let us see, what happened to him to make him a ghost...and a patriotic ghost at that. Read on...

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Finally, Milkha had reached the limit of his endurance. Yes, for
him it was his limit. He could not have continued assenting to the carnal
misuse of his body. It was time he took the crucial decision of his life as a
deportee.

‘Oh, the protector of my life! This humble fellow supplicates
to you...have some mercy on him,’ Milkha gave his best encomiums hoping to draw
the lenient attention of the Jamadar-supervisor on duty.

‘What...what’s
that you rot want from me? My distinguished bone-breaking kick or what?’ the
Jamadar was derisive but unusually soft in his tone. This fact encouraged
Milkha to try on.

‘My benevolent
saviour! This forever object of your kick has a terrible pain in his rotten
belly. Kindly have some mercy,’ Milkha pleaded maintaining effectively the same
subservient tone.

With a lot of initial
hesitation the supervisor finally yielded to the rarest of good sense within
himself. He removed the shackles from Milkha’s legs, gave him a mild kick, and
asked him to proceed to hospital to consult the physician over there.

Milkha left that place and slowly headed for the hospital. When he was
sure he had moved sufficiently away from the watchful view of the supervisor,
he swerved into the jungle and thereafter towards the creek where it was negotiable.
Now was time to cross the creek for liberty’s sake. With his knowledge of
swimming that was only rudimentary, Milkha was out to take the last desperate
gamble of his life. A burning desire to flee, a nebulous call to meet the
unknown, and the blinding charm of the liberty plunged him into the water right
away. The width of the creek was not much—barely a hundred metres or so.
Despite his not being an expert swimmer, Milkha could have crossed it with
ease; but his encounter with a man-eating shark pushed him on his way to his
ultimate fate. After fighting a desperate bout with the wandering pelagian he
gave in. Fatally wounded, he managed to somehow wade his way to the rocky
shore. There was hardly any hope of his recovery. None came to his rescue. He
died the death of a wounded boar in the deserted corner of the jungle.

Death could not end Milkha. It could only jettison his soul out of his
ephemeral body. For a soul that was busy till a moment ago chasing its far
dream of emancipation, it was not easy to give up. Milkha, the ghost lingered
on. He wandered about the places in search of opportunity to punish the
officers of penal settlement to satiate his psyche. He went everywhere his
spectral proclivities took him—to the peak of Mt Harriet,
to the beaches of Wandoor and Chidiya Tapu, and to the furthest islands of
Nancowrie and Teressa. As his permanent abode of meditation he finally chose
the cave near the jungle at Wandoor beach—not for its serene backdrop only, but
for its special spectral ambience. It was in this colony of ghosts and goblins that
he met his companion-confidant Lal Bawa who enlightened him how to conduct
himself well in his new role as a phantom. But his pursuit of liberty through
enlightenment came to an abrupt end on that fateful day of devastation—the
earthquake of June 1941.

*****

Liberated from the stony trap, Milkha was lost in momentary aimlessness.
His incorporeal impulse in high effervescence, he just moved about the places
touching the landmarks of the island. What could have been his first choice if
it was not the Cellular Jail? At first glance of the place, Milkha could feel
the difference. The whole place wore an entirely changed look. It had a nicely
laid out lawns with meticulously manicured hedges along the cobbled paths. The
lighting arrangement over there was quite elaborate. He came to observe from
the signposts that the structure had been elevated to the status of a national
memorial, a befitting classification for a venue of that importance. But Milkha
was very unhappy to see that the awe-inspiring structure of the jail had not
survived intact to the present day. A few of the wings had been demolished to
give way to the modern constructions.

Soon after, the patriot-ghost left the place and went round the town.
There had been a sea change everywhere, a change that touched and tampered
almost every aspect of the topography. With roads wider and houses multiplied
in their concrete incarnations, with trees cleared and swamps filled, with
hillocks razed and shores walled, Port Blair surprised Milkha more than it
welcomed him. Not many log houses of the past were in sight. The horse
carriages of the past had given way to the fuming automobiles. There were a lot
more shoppers and shopkeepers in the bazaar than Milkha was familiar with, more
boats moored to the quays than it was the case in his time. There were light
posts everywhere capable of inundating a flood of light in whole of the
township and keeping the darkness at bay. All these made him feel ill at ease
in his old habitat. It was definitely not the place Milkha wanted to visit to
assuage his nostalgia. Dismayed, he was now ready to leave for his cave.

As he was about to move, he
came to hear some music playing nearby. What was that the melody reminded him
about? It sounded very much like the opening concert of the open-air plays he
used to organise at his home town before misfortune overtook him. The
attraction of the old music was irresistible and Milkha felt like bursting into
a song. It was a feast for his psyche. To get the better feel of things, he
went inside the hall gingerly, making sure he did not disturb anybody in the
process.

And what did he find
there? Inside the hall, Milkha found a dozen of souls deeply engrossed in some
serious business. Quietly, he sat down on an empty bench and tried to
concentrate on their activities and conversation. It did not take him any
length of time to know that he was among a group of artists, rehearsing a play
to be staged that night.

The title of the drama
was a historical one, an episode that eulogised the heroic exploits of Sher
Ali, the deportee who assassinated Viceroy Lord Mayo. He accomplished that when
the viceroy was on his tour of the island, a place then full of the victims of
colonial injustice. No topic would have excited Milkha more than the present
one. The patriot-apparition was bodily alive when Sher Ali executed his plan
with enviable perfection. The chained convicts, the reformed convicts, and the
deportees—all were jubilant to receive the news of the success of Sher Ali.
Milkha had felt deeply anguished when Sher Ali was finally executed on 11th
March 1872, thirty-two days after the calamity. Repeatedly thereafter he had
dreamt about it. In his dream, he used to grab the gullet of the cruel
superintendent in his left hand and a dagger in his right, and sometimes he
even went to a point where his victim was just a thrust away from his end.
Milkha cherished to actually emulate the example of Sher Ali and give at least
one more tormentors a lesson of his life. He was for setting yet another
example before the perpetrators to dread. But queer was the course of history;
an achievement of that magnitude was not to happen again and again. At least
Milkha was not so lucky. Seated on the bench and spellbound, he watched the
proceedings there with total involvement.

‘Where is that unthinking duffer called Mihir? Where is that
callow youth called Mihir? My God, what’s that sin you’re punishing me for? The
show is only a few hours away and where have you hidden my thespian?’ the
director went on blabbering his choicest invectives. His reputation at stake,
he did not even spare god.

‘We can’t wait any longer. I feel we’ve to rush through our
parts and get ready for the show,’ one of the actors insisted.

‘Rushing through what? A play without a hero...what a big
hassle! Okay...Okay, you guys go ahead. Let me be here waiting for the
irresponsible absentee,’ the director went out in a fit of perturbation.

Milkha could not initially figure out the reason for the director’s
worry. But in due course this too became clear to him. He came to know that a
person by the name of Mihir, who was cast on the lead role of the play as Sher
Ali, was missing. The director had managed the rehearsal putting a dummy in
place of the absentee. But that did not solve the problem. As the afternoon
wore on, they all began to feel panicky. It was now a prestige issue. Among the
guests invited were the persons of national and international fame. Cancelling
a show of this significance would mean getting blacklisted in the books of the
Zonal Cultural Centre. It would ultimately mean cessation of all the future
sponsorships and the death for the dramatic institution.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

The Salvation

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This is a story from my book "The Remix of Orchid". I thought I could present it in three installments and keep the momentum of the blog going. It's a ghost story; its setting is historical; and the events took place at Port Blair. Read it not to believe but to enjoy it. Happy reading.

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THE SALVATION

============

It was pleasant December of 1997.
Just by being part of the laid-back city of Port Blair,
nobody could have grasped the reason why the unexciting place suddenly buzzed
with activity...why the sleepy little place amid the indigo waters of the Bay of Bengal so frantically woke to a frenzy of
excitement. One thing was certain: India was at the moment in her
golden jubilee year of independence, but that was too official to excite
anybody at all. Then what was in the air that made everybody feel so different?

The ambience, nevertheless, had
its historical overtones. Now all those terribly old people who had once
created the history visiting the Cellular Jail in the island as the
patriot-convicts in their fiery youth would be invited and honoured. The island
folks knew it very well—if it were not for those historical souls, the tiny
island would not have secured a niche for itself in the annals of patriotism.
But still they kept wondering if that was the right way to honour them, as the
old were just right for their sickbed, and not for a crowded public function!
Given that most of the patriots were dead by now, the question remained:
whither should they go to invite them?

It was open to
anybody’s guess if the invitation was also extended officially to the daemons
of the preternatural realm. But Milkha, a ghost being, came to know about the
pageantry-in-progress when a blast in a quarry catapulted him, making him
afloat in the ether of free India.
A grand feeling of liberation seized him. Now he was all out for
action—something he must do that would help him achieve his life’s ambition,
justify his posthumous existence, and above all, secure him peace and heavenly
rapture.

The poor apparition had
been dwelling restfully in a cave near the pristine beach of Wandoor
ever since he attained his ghosthood. But then a disaster was to strike his
abode on that fateful day of 26th June 1941. It was a double ravage
by the combined force of a powerful earthquake and a tsunami that blocked the
cave’s exit by a huge rock, and plunged the poor little soul into an agony of
confinement. Finding everything dark and dungeon-like all around, Milkha
abandoned all his hope of liberation. He was resigned to never seeing the light
again, for it was improbable that somebody would ever come to his rescue and
extricate him from the sealed cave.

Many a time thereafter
Milkha had thought of forcing his exit all alone, but something seemed to have
prevented him always. His boundless supernatural might had proved to be of
little use. He used to fear his incautious attempt might uproot the Banmohua
tree standing down the slope. It was a tree, a very special one to him indeed,
where his mentor Lal Bawa used to live, and Milkha could not have dreamt of
destroying it. It would have been an act of sheer ungratefulness on his part to
despoil the abode of somebody that had once accommodated him so affably. He and
his mentor, the two surreal beings, had spent countless hours of conviviality
there. When in due course of his spectral maturation Milkha came to realise
that his salvation would take years to eventuate and when such realisation in
him plunged him into the quicksand of depression, he had desperately needed
somebody to look to for his solace. Lal Bawa was his companion-in-need then,
who had consoled him, encouraged him, and given him the mantra that proved to
be the ultimate raison d’etre of his surreal existence. Now that Milkha was in
trouble he could not have behaved insensibly and rolled the huge rock onto his
mentor’s abode to damage it. He decided he had better remain trapped in the
cave, listen to all the developments around from his mentor, and wait for the
opportune moment for his release and salvation. He was prepared to wait for
aeons even, if his luck was not to make it happen any earlier.

Finally the detonation
of dynamite played the symphony of liberation to the ghost being. It ripped
apart the huge rock and ejected him out to show the light of free India.
Milkha was overwhelmed. He wanted to thank the quarry owner, even for his
unintentional help. The latter was standing at a distance, safe enough to keep
him away from hitting the splinters.

‘Thanks a lot,
brother, I’m really, really grateful to you,’ Milkha approached the contractor
with a woodcutter’s axe resting on his shoulder.

‘Grateful to
me…and for what?’ the dumbstruck contractor had no clue how a person could
still be left so near the detonation spot and return so luckily unhurt!

‘I thank you for
saving me,’ Milkha told something as an explanation that failed to convince the
contractor.

‘Then go and thank God for keeping you alive and I’m thanking
Him for saving me from a murder case,’ the contractor had this much to mumble
before trying to forget the shock. But then he could not be so abrupt in his
communication with a person who had just returned from the doorstep of the lord
of death. ‘Aren’t you heading for Port Blair? A band is putting on a gala
concert this evening at the stadium, you know—Netaji Stadium.’

‘Of course, I’m
going there now,’ Milkha the ghost being sped up and vanished in a trice. The
contractor went back to his work.

Before he attained his
ghosthood, let’s say, more than a century ago, Milkha was a deported convict at
the Andamans. He had come there on being sentenced to deportation by the
session’s judge of Balasore. The charge against him was one of sedition, for
the simple reason that he did not pull on well with the royal scion of
Rajnilgir. The British resident commissioner of that princely state had
instituted the case on behalf of the ruler. One of the frivolous charges
brought against Milkha was he had drugged the horse meant for the lady Resident
Commissioner to induce a wayward behaviour in the animal and cause injury to
the white lady. It was taken to be an attempt of an inferior black to murder a
lady of a superior race. The other charge was rather complicated. The
allegation said that Milkha staged the folk drama in the open-air theatres and
composed some anti-white lyrics for its musical sequences. “Lily-white skin
upon a chilly-hot heart, hound them first oh-ho hound them first...” The
lyrics were considered potentially dangerous, intended to incite a rebellion
against the princely state and its British protectors. In fact, after the play
was staged, people started reciting them everywhere—on the road, in the field,
aboard the bullock carts, at the bathing ghats—parodying
the colonialists and their stooge in the ruler of the princely state. It was
the evidence they were looking for and, what was more it was easy for the
prosecution to bring in witnesses from tribals who could recite the lyric
before the judge at an unbroken pace.

But the main motive of
the young prince was to eliminate Milkha who was the sole witness to his
passionate affair with the lady Resident Commissioner. As the coachman of the
carriage, Milkha had been the witness to numerous instances of those unseemly
sessions that took place between the paramours. Somehow the adulterous duo felt
increasingly insecure about the trustworthiness of Milkha. Then followed a
secret report to the residency: Milkha with the active help from the tribals of
the area was going to organise a rebellion against the British authorities and
their protectorate, the princely state of Rajnilgir. A search and seizure
operation was conducted at Milkha’s place that resulted in recovery of
firearms, bows and arrows, and swords and spikes.

‘You’re
conspiring to kill white people—is that true?’ the judge had asked Milkha at
the end of the proceeding.

‘No my lord, I’m incapable of killing even a rodent. I can’t
kill my masters, I’m not so ungrateful,’ Milkha had insisted in response.

‘But we’ve evidence
before us. Weapons have been seized from your house. Can you disprove that?’
the judge had dared.

Milkha could not explain properly that the seized objects were the
accessories for staging open-air plays, and that they were only the fake ones
meant for the mock fighting onstage. The trial constituted a mockery of
justice. The European lady testified that Milkha was often careless in managing
the horse carriage and that he was spiteful of the British race in his talk and
manners. That was all. Now Milkha was dubbed a seditious fellow in the guise of
a servant of the British. Justice saw the truth shown to it: the rustic
scoundrel was not to be taken for what he looked; he was definitely preparing
to kill the officers posted there and usurp the kingship of Rajnilgir.

While it was time to
award punishment, the judge had banked on his pet colonial prejudice. That
crime was the natural tendency with the natives was his belief, and that a
punishment was no punishment if not exemplary was his conviction. Such was the
notion, more or less, with all the white people in the subcontinent and there
had been no change in their attitudes ever since the Sepoy Mutiny had nearly
uprooted them. The case against Milkha did not involve a murder. It was the
only extenuating factor before the dispenser of justice. As such, awarding a
punishment of hanging was out of consideration. Finally, the judge had decided
to order deportation of Milkha to Kālāpāni
or the penal settlement of the Andamans for a life-term to meet what he
called the end of justice. The ruler of Rajnilgir could not have been happier.

Released from the dark
depth of his hellish cave, Milkha remembered his days of agony on the island. Now
he had only a bundle of experience with him that made him feel different from
other ordinary spectral figures. He loved to ruminate over them, reconstruct
them and feel inspired by the righteous satisfaction that emanated from them.
It appeared to him as if events had happened only the previous night, and his
agonies were like those distant nightmares that no longer scared him to
gloom.

It was vivid before
Milkha how he had bid a teary adieu to his motherland in that sombre autumn
evening, and how he was taken by a steamer to the Andamans via Rangoon. He had reached
the island a broken man, with a feeling of helplessness compounded by despair
and revolt. In a flash, everything about his native place had just receded into
the domain of distant memory; it was finally lost for him far behind the black
waters of the Bay of Bengal. Situation had
demanded that he should quickly begin to like the place or perish. But what was
there for him to like? Swamp and centipede, mosquito and insomnia, physical
pain and famishment—with living conditions so brutal and an environment so full
of malevolence, the whole environment was only too infernal.

When he had reached at Viper Island,
a place every deportee was brought for inculcating discipline, terrible things
were waiting to happen. His unfortunate body was yet another one to be fettered
with a chain gang. Already he had the shackles on his legs and waist; now a
chain joined him to a group of four persons. All the four convicts were
likewise in shackles, each chained with a neck ring, and their number-badges
dangling from such rings made them look like animals on their way to butchery.
Everyday a promoted convict used to come to them to supervise. The label “promoted”
gave them each a sadistic halo and those dangerous ex-convicts took their job too
seriously on being promoted as the supervisors of the chain gangs. They would
give unprovoked canning to the new deportees—as if they were the softest
possible targets for their unending wrath, and as if it were their turn to take
revenge for the punishment meted out to them by the jail officers before their
so-called good behaviour brought them the promotion. Such emancipating merit of
theirs, recognised as the ‘good behaviour’, was only a euphemism for their
shameful acquiescence; it was nothing but their passive role in sodomy that the
petty officers used to rightfully practise on them!

The thick-skinned
co-convicts in the gang, it seemed to Milkha, had no great difficulty in
putting up with the physical punishments. At times they used to ridicule,
snorting the barbaric punishment away by their contemptuous whimpers. But
Milkha found them agonising; his body and soul used to rattle with every swish
of can that ruptured his skin. There was always a back-breaking load of work to
perform if one were to avoid punishment, earn subsistence and keep the
supervisors “happy” for an elusive promotion to a status of a reformed
convict! His chain gang was asked to clear the jungle in and around Viper Island
while the rings around their necks and waists, and in some cases fetters around
their feet, made them struggle for steps. The convict Jamadar used to guard
them from a distance, his watchful gaze fixed on every single movement of
Milkha. The ancient trees were stubborn enough to disregard the thud of an axe.
The cutting implements were deliberately made small just to prevent their
misuse by the convicts against the guarding Jamadars. When authorities found Milkha
not skilled enough for felling the trees, they confined him to the refractory
ward to slog moulding bricks and grinding lime mortar paste for catering to the
construction activities. The food was horrible, less than a working fellow
would require for sustaining him through the hard days’ labour under scorching
tropical sun. The wretched Rangoon
rice with coarse salt and the nominal brown liquid called dal werethe items meant
for those hungry unfortunate humans. And they were the ones kept alive just for
cutting down the jungle!

The agonising moments thus slogged past the wasteland of Milkha’s life
through the ten long suffering years. He was transformed, as it were, into a
worthless mound of pessimism. There was none with whom he could have shared his
anguish; no spot nearby was safe enough for risking an escape. Many a time his
desperation made him contemplate all sorts of reckless adventures. Sometimes it
appeared to him as though everything was within his reach, and what was required
of him was only a gutsy step out of the barrack. He was ready to run away from
Viper Island and go anywhere his fate would lead him to—no matter whether it
were the hell. Too desperate to be circumspect, he was not bothered by the
consequence that lay ahead. His absent-mindedness, his slip in daily drudgery,
and above all his physical incapacity to give an impressive outturn earned him
additional physical punishments day after day.